Down times for downtown

From today’s editorials: The growth and development of Albany’s western edge comes at a cost.

Imagine Gene Bunnell, by day a planning professor at the University at Albany, moonlighting as a tour guide. Imagine him taking people out to the western edge of the city, which is booming, and speaking candidly, without a trace of boosterism.

They might hear him repeat this assessment:

“That area is pieces that don’t fit together,” he says. “It’s a series of fragments, and I think people’s mental maps of it are very poor.”

Imagine, too, Mr. Bunnell, taking people through a downtown that suffers while such areas as the university’s NanoCollege along Fuller Road and the Patroon Creek Office Park on Washington Avenue Extension thrive — in all their sprawl.

The architecture would look as it has for ages. It would require a peek inside vacant and soon-to-be empty buildings, to see how an exodus of jobs reinforces the reality of less life on the streets.

The tour might start on Broadway, where the southern edge of downtown awaits the unfulfilled promise of a stalled convention center project. EYP Architecture and Engineering is moving out of the five-story office building at 412 Broadway that it’s occupied for more than 30 years. That space has gotten cramped, the company says. Besides, the action is moving to Fuller Road, where the nanotechnology complex of five buildings and 800,000 square feet of offices, laboratories and classrooms — and 2,500 jobs — is about to get even bigger.

That means 130 fewer jobs downtown.

The tour could move a few blocks north, where the state Office of Real Property Services moved 200 workers from 16 Sheridan Ave. to the uptown W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus last summer.

It could meander back to 575 Broadway, where the old Union Station — later refurbished as Kiernan Plaza and hailed as a cornerstone of an urban renaissance — has been empty since the Bank of America left.

All the while, one might fairly wonder where Albany is headed. The downtown of a city — walkable, for the most part, easily assessible by public transit and with a developed infrastructure — is losing out to a part of town that less than a century ago was mostly undeveloped Pine Bush. What’s left of an ecological treasure is overwhelmed by commercial and technological success that depends so heavily on the environmental intrusion known as the automobile. What an odd juncture for a city so rich in history to be at early in what looms as a transformative century.

Growth and expansion is inevitable, of course. The point isn’t to resist that, or to begrudge the economic success still within the boundaries of a city that needs more of it.

Instead, the point is to again pose the question raised by Mayor Jerry Jennings last summer:

“What’s going to happen to the city?”

The decline of the core of an urban capital isn’t good for anyone, or any place — not even a thriving technology corridor.

One Response

Why doesn’t the government move all their employees downtown? Doesn’t that make more sense than having office parks in the sprawl? Wouldn’t that facilitate communication and interaction between government agencies?

What about tax breaks for companies that move to downtown office buildings or renovate old buildings instead of building new?

Most importantly, why don’t the city urban planners develop a hard and enforced urban growth boundary?